Open Game License

• 1. Introduction

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  The Open Game License, usually shortened to OGL, is a public copyright license from Wizards of the Coast for tabletop role-playing games. Developers can use it to give others permission to modify, copy and redistribute parts of their games, notably the game mechanics. In January 2023 this legal document made headlines at IGN, Vice, The Guardian and the Financial Times. Those outlets reported on the anger of fans and professional creators. A license about game rules had become a news story far beyond gaming circles. Why would the maker of Dungeons & Dragons hand its rules to rival publishers in the first place? And what happened when Wizards proposed changing the deal?

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• 2. What It Grants

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  The license text promises a "perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive license" to anyone who accepts its terms. In exchange, those who use the license receive the right to use what it calls Open Game Content.

  Open Game Content, or OGC, is the game mechanic itself. That includes the methods, procedures, processes and routines behind a game. It also covers anything the contributor clearly labels as open, along with translations and derivative works.

  Product Identity, or PI, stays locked away. It covers product and product line names, logos and trade dress. It reaches stories, plots, dialogue and artwork, plus the names and descriptions of characters, spells, places, creatures and equipment. Using another company's Product Identity breaches the agreement.

  The wording of that first grant, and the single word "perpetual" inside it, would later sit at the center of a fierce legal argument.

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• 3. Dancey's Bet

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  Ryan Dancey spearheaded the license, which Wizards of the Coast published in 2000 as version 1.0. Version 1.0a followed soon after. It opened up portions of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons through a System Reference Document, or SRD. That document included the basic rules and elements of the game, such as classes, monsters, spells and magic items. Dancey modeled the license on open-source licenses from the software industry. Publishers could also use a separate d20 System Trademark License to display a logo showing their products were compatible.

  In one interview, Dancey said there was "a very, very strong business case" for embracing the ideas at the heart of the Open Source movement. He argued that a clear policy on what Wizards would and would not allow should spur "a huge surge in independent content creation" feeding the D&D network.

  The academics Benoît Demil and Xavier Lecocq, writing in the journal Revue d'économie industrielle, read a sharper strategy in it. If more publishers used the same rule system, players would only need to learn one. The number of original systems would shrink, but the audience would grow for everybody, especially the market leader. The final aim was to make "d20" a recognizable trademark, in the way "VHS" or "DVD" had become.

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• 4. The d20 Boom

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  The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game grew directly out of the OGL. It is a stand-alone game that modifies the 3.5 version of the rules. Publishers and groups who license their work under the OGL and similar documents are sometimes collectively called the open gaming movement.

  James Maliszewski, writing for The Escapist, credited the license with helping launch the Old School Revival. By 2002, he wrote, fans on Dragonsfoot and other old school forums had started using the SRD to reverse engineer the out-of-print AD&D.

  In 2014, Demil and Lecocq described an immediate effect on the industry. New tabletop role-playing publications multiplied, and the majority of new entrants adopted the d20 license. Products carrying it sold at a higher rate than those without it until the mid 2000s. Wizards managers considered the license a huge success, and the rise of electronic publishing amplified it.

  Christopher B. Seaman and Thuan Tran, in a 2022 article for the Iowa Law Review, said the OGL created a major shift in the RPG industry and led to a boom in the early 2000s. They noted that dozens of D&D-compatible supplements had been created under it.

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• 5. Detours and Returns

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  In June 2008, Wizards of the Coast moved to a new royalty-free but more restrictive license called the Game System License, or GSL. It was meant for third-party products compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. The GSL was incompatible with the OGL. Yet by its own terms the OGL was perpetual, and it stayed in widespread use.

  Greg Tito, writing for The Escapist in 2011, said the GSL took away "many of the freedoms that the industry had come to expect". One example was reprinting text for clarity in new products.

  Andy Collins, a D&D designer who became Design & Development Manager around the release of 4th edition, remembered arguing hard for something like the 3rd edition arrangement. He feared that Wizards would leave behind customers who saw an open license as an assumed part of D&D. In hindsight, he wondered whether it might have been better to let the OGL die. Instead, he said, the company crafted "a Frankenstein's monster of an open license that ended up pleasing basically nobody".

  On the 12th of January 2016, Wizards released the 5th Edition SRD under version 1.0a of the OGL. That marked a return to the open gaming format. The SRD was revised and rereleased as SRD 5.1 in May 2016.

  Creators also gained a second route through the Dungeon Masters Guild storefront. Its license lets individuals and publishers sell work based on specific Wizards properties, including the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Eberron and the Magic: The Gathering planes. Creators set their own prices, but Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf take a 50% cut of the proceeds.

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• 6. Leak and Backlash

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  In August 2022, Wizards launched a public playtest of the next version of Dungeons & Dragons under the One D&D initiative. By November 2022, unconfirmed leaks had fueled speculation that the OGL would be discontinued for it. Wizards replied that it would keep supporting the thousands of creators making third-party D&D material when One D&D arrived in 2024. It added that the OGL would continue to evolve, but gave no specifics.

  Game Rant observed that tons of creators and companies made their living selling third-party homebrew. ComicBook.com added that skipping a new SRD would not snuff out third-party material but would discourage publishing. Publishers might then be pushed toward the Dungeon Masters Guild, which uses a separate license.

  In December 2022, Wizards released details of a proposed OGL 1.1 meant to take effect in 2023. It would have applied only to printed media and static electronic files such as epubs and PDFs. Video games and virtual tabletops would fall outside it. Creators would have needed an official OGL badge on their products. Anyone earning over $50,000 a year from OGL material would report revenue to Wizards. Creators with income of at least $750,000 a year would pay a royalty starting in 2024. Wizards said fewer than 20 creators would owe it, among them Kobold Press and Ghostfire Gaming.

  On the 5th of January 2023, Lin Codega of Io9 reported on a leaked full copy of the draft. It would stop authorizing the original OGL 1.0. Attorneys consulted by Codega thought this might void any future use of the original license. The draft also said the OGL was never meant to fund major competitors or to allow D&D apps or videos. Eric Law of Game Rant warned that Wizards would gain full rights to anything created under it. ICv2 noted that creators would keep ownership but grant Wizards a perpetual, irrevocable right to use their works without payment.

  Paizo, Kobold Press and Green Ronin were named as large publishers built mostly on the original OGL. Charlie Hall of Polygon reported that Kickstarter had negotiated a lower royalty for creators using its platform.

  ComicBook.com spoke with over 20 small and mid-sized creators whose in-progress projects were placed on hold. Many designers considered switching role-playing systems entirely. A grassroots petition called #OpenDND gathered signatures from community figures including Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus writer M.T. Black, streamer Mara Holmes and Sly Flourish publisher Mike Shea. A campaign to cancel D&D Beyond subscriptions also took off. Io9 reported that its sources at Wizards called the financial impact not negligible, and that management scrambled to adjust its messaging.

  Competitors moved quickly. Kobold Press and MCDM Productions each announced new tabletop systems that would be open games. Paizo announced the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC, an open, perpetual and irrevocable license that works with any game system. Paizo said neither it nor any other publisher would own the ORC, protecting it from future attempts to change or rescind it. Kobold Press, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Legendary Games and Rogue Genius Games said they would join its development. Free League Publishing announced two licenses of its own, one for its Year Zero system and another for its fantasy game Dragonbane.

  On the 13th of January 2023, Wizards answered through D&D Beyond. It walked back the royalty structure and the license-back language, and said virtual tabletops and livestreams would not be affected. ComicBook.com said the statement did not address deauthorization. Io9 called the effort "incredible spin doctoring", and Polygon found Twitter reactions still overwhelmingly negative.

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• 7. Can It Be Revoked?

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  Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered a legal reading in 2023. Role-playing games contain copyrightable creative expression and uncopyrightable functional descriptions of mechanics. She called the original OGL "very narrow". Even without it, she said, a creator could use the noncopyrightable elements of D&D or make fair use of copyrightable ones. The primary benefit of the license is knowing the exact terms, which spares a publisher from being sued or from proving fair use in an expensive court fight.

  Walsh also pointed out that "perpetual" and "irrevocable" are separate legal terms. The OGL says it is perpetual, but it never says it is irrevocable.

  In an update to her article, Walsh wrote that Wizards' past statements make clear the company saw the OGL as a contract with obligations on both sides. An offer to contract like this cannot be revoked unilaterally once accepted, under the law of Washington, where Wizards is located, and other states. Works already published under OGL 1.0a are entitled to the promised benefit. Wizards could, however, withdraw the offer for new users who had not yet accepted it.

  Section 9 of the license complicates matters further. It lets third parties use any authorized version to copy, modify and distribute Open Game Content from any version. Kyle Orland of Ars Technica noted that this clause, together with Wizards' original 2001 FAQ, seems to suggest companies could keep using the old license for products based on the old ruleset. Wizards itself said in 2004 that Section 9 already covers earlier material, so users could continue with an earlier, acceptable version.

  Ryan Dancey, the license's architect and a former VP at Wizards, told EN World that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. Had that been a reserved power, he said, it would have been spelled out in the license. He added that he was on record in emails, blogs and interviews saying the license "could never be revoked".

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• 8. Reversal and Afterlife

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  On the 19th of January 2023, Wizards released a new draft, OGL 1.2, for public comment, following an apology. A day earlier, The Washington Post reported, executive producer Kyle Brink had issued a mea culpa on behalf of his team. The comment period was to last two weeks. Some D&D mechanics would have moved under a Creative Commons license, with other material covered by OGL 1.2. Unlike the leak, the draft had no royalty payment, no financial reporting, no license-back, no registration and no distinction between commercial and non-commercial work. It would have been irrevocable, and it would have banned harmful, discriminatory or illegal material. It would also have deauthorized OGL 1.0a. Brink framed that step as necessary to enforce the new ban on hateful or harmful material.

  On the 27th of January 2023, Wizards reported what it had learned from over 15,000 survey submissions. Some 88% did not want to publish under OGL 1.2, and 89% were dissatisfied with deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. Another 86% disliked the draft policy on virtual tabletops. Meanwhile 62% were satisfied with placing SRD material under Creative Commons, and most of the rest wanted more of it placed there.

  Wizards responded by releasing SRD 5.1 under the irrevocable Creative Commons license CC-BY-4.0, effective immediately. It also dropped its attempt to deauthorize OGL 1.0a. Brink said that putting the entire 400-page SRD in Creative Commons meant fans did not need to take the company's word for it. Codega called that open acknowledgment of broken trust incredible. Milton Griepp of ICv2 labeled the episode a PR disaster for Wizards and doubted the steps would undo moves like Paizo's. Hoffer of ComicBook.com called it a huge victory for the community. Charlie Hall of Polygon noted the possible effect on the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, due in March 2023.

  In May 2024, Codega, by then writing for Rascal, concluded that the OGL would not return. Wizards had announced that the revised 5th Edition would have its SRD released under Creative Commons. Codega found that choice both "fascinating" and "sad", while still calling it a good decision.

  On the 22nd of April 2025, SRD 5.2 appeared under a Creative Commons license, reflecting the 2024 revision of the 5th Edition rules. Jess Lanzillo, VP of Franchise and Product for Dungeons & Dragons, said the SRD will be part of the errata process. Future versions will carry new version numbers as official clarifications and corrections are published.

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